1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to electronic communications, and more particularly, to inferring social groups based on online activity of a user.
2. Description of the Related Art
Communications in the digital era has evolved from communicating via emails with one or two users at a time to interacting with various groups of users across different service providers and social networks. Each social network behaves like a monolithic entity but is actually composed of small sub-groups. As a result, social contacts within some of the sub-groups may include social contacts from other sub-groups, leading to the formation of concentric circles of these social contacts. For instance, members (i.e. social contacts) within a development team in an office are part of an overall office team, which is part of a professional entity and which is part of an industry. When circles of social contacts are defined for the aforementioned example, the sub-groups of members are represented as concentric circles with the members of the development team forming the inner-most concentric circle and the members of the industry forming the outermost concentric circle with each circle from inside moving outward expanding the social contacts of the user. Other circles of social contacts may intersect each other at various levels depending on the level of commonality that exists amongst the users in the various groups. For instance, a user's circle of friends may include friends from the user's professional circle, from the development team in which the user is a part, and from non-professional circle. A user trying to interact with different social contacts has to navigate to all the various circles of contacts and select the social contacts from each circle, which can be overwhelming and difficult to undertake.
In order to alleviate this problem for the user, some of the social networking service providers include tools for specifying social contacts for a social interaction. The main disadvantage with these tools is that each circle has to be defined manually in a meticulous manner, which is very time-consuming and intense. Other social networking sites provide a tool that analyzes a user's profile and recommends/suggests a small list of users that best fit the user's profile. For instance, the tool may determine that the user belongs to a particular organization and recommend social contacts from within the organization. However, this list is very narrow and is limited to members of the organization, such as college, workplace, etc., and does not include contacts outside the organization. Further, the small list of suggested social contacts may include users from the circle of social contacts (i.e. organization) that a user may never have an interest to interact with but are included solely for the reason that they belonged to the same circle of social contacts as the user. Providing such a list defeats the purpose for which it was generated, viz., identifying social contacts within the circle that the user is interested in interacting.
It would, therefore, be desirable to have a tool that provides a way to organize a user's social contacts based on the user's communication pattern irrespective of which organization or groups the social contacts belong.
It is in this context that the embodiments of the invention arise.